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Loss of backlinks seen at ahrefs:  I've seen this on a number of different websites, and am not convinced that it's all that accurate.  In none of the cases have I seen a real loss of backlinks--what may be happening is that the links are on weak pages that finally get so weak, ahrefs' crawler doesn't even visit them. Anchor text: I would aim for a pretty high percentage of your anchor text being your brand/domain name.  From this article, it would appear that brand/domain anchor text at or below 35% of your links is a recipe for a penalty.  I'd aim for a number greater than 50% if it were me. I'm not sure what you're talking about in your 2nd question about anchor text. For detecting backlinks that are a real problem, I'm a big fan of the Link Detox report from Link Research Tools.  In my opinion it's well worth the money.  For removing problem backlinks, contacting webmasters, etc. I'm a proponent of rmoov.

thank you for the great advices Kurt. have a lot of think about how to best move forward and get people involved, and more importantly, how to capture all that seo juice so i wont loose any. seo seems alot more fun now then before when it was just about linking

Thank you so much Lynn. it has helped so much for my understanding of reading these data, as well as seo. I will definitely take these knowledge to my future sites as well. loosk like natural linkings is the way to go